Arcadia's legacy wrote:I thought we already established the the FoI were not transformed humans, but formed from Liliths LCL pool and "phased" through the Geofront surface (think GNR in EoE)

How the heck do you "establish" something like that?

Avatar: Guu is uncertain...Crying Man(Or, How Dr. Katsuragi Found God): Read at AO3 & Discuss Here. Status: First Draft. Chapter 10: Idle Hands released 5/24/2017."Fighting idiocy is like fighting a hydra. Cut off one head, two more grow back and need to tell you their uninformed opinion." - PeeJee, Something*Positive

Okay, poor choice of words. what i mean is that out of all theories and ideas as to how the FoI's were able to appear in Tokyo-3 without causing far more damage than they should, the one i just described (and El Mariachi did a better job of explaining) would be the most likley

Never let the flame that is hope burn out, for despite the length of the night, the sunrise will always come

There's far too much missing information to say which idea is "more likely". I do find it terribly suspect that Shinji's concern about the fates of his friends is met with Kaworu showing him the surface, with the camera lingering on FoIs while Kaworu discusses extinction and evolution. This visual storytelling provides one of the strongest hints currently available, and I don't think it should be dismissed just because there is difficulty filling in the gaps.

Avatar: Guu is uncertain...Crying Man(Or, How Dr. Katsuragi Found God): Read at AO3 & Discuss Here. Status: First Draft. Chapter 10: Idle Hands released 5/24/2017."Fighting idiocy is like fighting a hydra. Cut off one head, two more grow back and need to tell you their uninformed opinion." - PeeJee, Something*Positive

It does explain why Lilith's chamber and the main shaft are choked up with well-formed FoIs and the fact that they seem to be moving up away from the chamber rather than down toward it.

Tokyo-3 was being evacuated when Zeruel leveled it and the brief shots we see in 3.0 don't show any reconstruction, so I'm thinking the 3.0 preview was on spot and the city was abandoned after Near-Third Impact except for Kaworu, some of the Nerv staff and the JSSDF or whatever occupying force swooped in.

But there are so many "whos" and "ifs" in the scenario that don't make sense with the little information we have.

Why are there malformed stragglers on the surface, why are they merging together and why do they all look like Unit 01?

What role does Unit 01 play in any of this? Lilith was unaffected by it before and there's no obvious sign it was anywhere near Central Dogma after it awakened.

Who removed the spears from either of them and why? And if Eva Mark.06 was autonomous, how was it able to manipulate a spear when Kaworu says that ReiQ/Mark.09 couldn't?

What was Kaworu doing during Third Impact if the Eva was acting without him?

Between Unit 01, Mark.06, and the 12th Angel, it almost feels like there's an extra party who doesn't fit into the chain of events as they're shown. The only reason I can think of to free Unit 01 is that Nerv was forced to invoke the Godzilla Threshold and tried to turn it against the Mark.06 after it was taken over/fused with Lilith.

Kaworu may have Shinji's happiness in mind, but I find he's a dubious narrator at best. He may just be easily deceived as he was by Gendo with the spears, but his ability to control Eva 13 even after being locked out makes me lean more heavily toward "outright duplicitous."

A thread I was looking for:) I'm interested in the 8+2 eva thing in the preview since a point is made about it in the op, Asuka is still a sucker for support (Mari never fully provides since she's not Shinji), the frankestein (heh) eva design spells the action roles and their value according to the present Asuka. Doesn't mean Toji is not grown up and all the op stuff but that means potentially stealing a role* Kaji can still play from the tv series, for Toji to go out and avoid the old man love interest role it would be a matter of...yeah...economy....which is weird given a whole new crew of dudes....:/ brb

*the suzuhara girl too as Shinji's bud, then again the subs I had have her thank Shinji for being friend with her brother....huh.

I still want Mari to fit better than bomb dropper/ Asuka friend/ double nerv-wille agent/ Kaji bud.'Cause I can assume Kaji told her a lot and it would be fun to at least speculate how he behaved to the girls and gendo (this one could be a no brainer because of Kaji being a wille dude who has an aura made of nothing atm). No plot tho unless we look at the girls? For Asuka to look for Shinji it's because of lack of support and the same goes for Misato, again a mirrored role and arc hinting Kaji is not just "distant" from Misato, so is Kaji still alive just to cheer Shinji up and die because of something wrong before taking on Misato and Asuka or what? How does Mari fit as a relationship other than backing Asuka up?Like, IRONY BOMB , she was Kensuke's sister this whole time;0 everyone's an eva pilot but the nerd:p

Last edited by unz on Mon Sep 07, 2015 1:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

PurpleandRed wrote:By behavior that she has done towards the kids getting excited at the aquariums and all that, she seems to still want to be the teenager who grows up too fast.

I don't really consider that part of her character in rebuild. She might have been like that in the series, but she's introduced believing she's the absolute best and doesn't need anyone in order to save the world so there's no need to bother with things like spending time with others. She only goes to the aquarium because Misato made her. After she realizes she can't do everything alone because of the angel drop, she doesn't play with her game boy and is increasingly concerned about others.

It's a visual aid to illustrate her character growth and save screen time. In the classroom, her kicking the classmate could easily be interpreted very differently (just pick a Japanese school life cliche) if she wasn't focused on the game she was playing. When others approached her, she drove them away because they didn't interest her. In the aquarium her relative seclusion shows she doesn't really care about anything there because she looks to the game for entertainment. After the angel drop, she doesn't yet understand it but she's driven to be around and empathize with others. Hopping into Shinji's bed, not dismissing Hikari's friendship, saving the dinner party, having a heart to heart conversation...

BlueBasilisk wrote:It does explain why Lilith's chamber and the main shaft are choked up with well-formed FoIs and the fact that they seem to be moving up away from the chamber rather than down toward it.

Tokyo-3 was being evacuated when Zeruel leveled it and the brief shots we see in 3.0 don't show any reconstruction, so I'm thinking the 3.0 preview was on spot and the city was abandoned after Near-Third Impact except for Kaworu, some of the Nerv staff and the JSSDF or whatever occupying force swooped in.

But there are so many "whos" and "ifs" in the scenario that don't make sense with the little information we have.

Why are there malformed stragglers on the surface, why are they merging together and why do they all look like Unit 01?

What role does Unit 01 play in any of this? Lilith was unaffected by it before and there's no obvious sign it was anywhere near Central Dogma after it awakened.

Who removed the spears from either of them and why? And if Eva Mark.06 was autonomous, how was it able to manipulate a spear when Kaworu says that ReiQ/Mark.09 couldn't?

What was Kaworu doing during Third Impact if the Eva was acting without him?

Between Unit 01, Mark.06, and the 12th Angel, it almost feels like there's an extra party who doesn't fit into the chain of events as they're shown. The only reason I can think of to free Unit 01 is that Nerv was forced to invoke the Godzilla Threshold and tried to turn it against the Mark.06 after it was taken over/fused with Lilith.

Kaworu may have Shinji's happiness in mind, but I find he's a dubious narrator at best. He may just be easily deceived as he was by Gendo with the spears, but his ability to control Eva 13 even after being locked out makes me lean more heavily toward "outright duplicitous."

I thought so too at first, but it was proven quite conclusively in another thread that they're Unit 01's model from 2.22 reskinned in red. There are a few of them that face the camera, and they have Unit 01's unique shoulder pylons, upper arm stripe and chest plate. Mark.06 has a standard v-shaped Eva chest plate, curved shoulder pylons and three segments over its stomach instead of the normal two.

BlueBasilisk wrote:Tokyo-3 was being evacuated when Zeruel leveled it and the brief shots we see in 3.0 don't show any reconstruction, so I'm thinking the 3.0 preview was on spot and the city was abandoned after Near-Third Impact except for Kaworu, some of the Nerv staff and the JSSDF or whatever occupying force swooped in.(...)Kaworu may have Shinji's happiness in mind, but I find he's a dubious narrator at best. He may just be easily deceived as he was by Gendo with the spears, but his ability to control Eva 13 even after being locked out makes me lean more heavily toward "outright duplicitous."

I'd agree with you in the sense that the 3.0 preview is probably one of our only leads in making sense of the events leading up to 3.0.

Anno subverting the audience's expectations by eliding the events of the preview, imo that's a really interesting narrative device. What doesn't make sense is the popular assumption that because none of the actual shots from the trailer were replicated in the film itself, that means that the events of the trailer never happened and that the preview was BS from start to finish.

While given the long production periods it's only natural that some elements would have been changed by the production team, I don't picture Anno just waking up one day, manically throwing out his Q script and starting from scratch. (... and now I do picture it). My point in all this is that either the whole of Q is just this massive nightmare in Shinji's head, with Yui or whoever playing to his longstanding abandonment issues (which imho would be a pretty lazy cop-out), or several key characters are deliberately withholding key information from him in order to have him behave the way they want him to (which is a slightly terrifying prospect, but at least a fairly consistent one).

Leading Shinji to believe that he caused the quasi-destruction of mankind, when we clearly saw Kaworu ending N3I in the Ha's "stinger", and quite a bit of human activity and EoE-esque politicking in the Q preview, has to have some deeply cynical purpose, but I can't figure out what that purpose could be given that both Wille and Nerv are doing this. Given Kaworu's deeply guilt-tripping spiel while looking at the desolation in Q, and his baffling foreknowledge of pretty much the entire events of NTE with the notable exception of the spear bait-and-switch (or whatever that was), and I have a really hard time taking anything he says at face value.

Changes happen during any production as the thinktank comes up with new ideas and new inspirations. It's all a part of the creative process and it's just fine as long as the revisions are consistent with what's come before! The interviews with Anno and Co. in the 2.0 CRC are really revealing in that regard.

Q's trailer could easily happen in the time skip with the exception of Unit 08, and they could recycle most of that design into one of the missing Evas if they really wanted to. The extant Unit 08 only shares hints of the head design. And as deceptive as the visuals are, Misato's narration describes Q very well, just not in the context you're expecting.

Unit 01 is contained with Shinji and Rei still inside, but in the tesseract. Tokyo 3 is destroyed. The Nerv staff being incarcerated could refer either to Shinji being held by Wille or to Gendo and Fuyutsuki being held by Kaworu. Unit 06 doesn't descend into Dogma in the movie, but it's already there. Unit 08 is already in service with a pilot but we do see the birth of Eva 13 and Shinji being "reborn" instead. And fate draws the five Children together in Dogma to stop 4th Impact in a big Eva battle.

gryzzli86 wrote:several key characters are deliberately withholding key information from him in order to have him behave the way they want him to (which is a slightly terrifying prospect, but at least a fairly consistent one).

Leading Shinji to believe that he caused the quasi-destruction of mankind, when we clearly saw Kaworu ending N3I in the Ha's "stinger", and quite a bit of human activity and EoE-esque politicking in the Q preview, has to have some deeply cynical purpose, but I can't figure out what that purpose could be given that both Wille and Nerv are doing this.

Bingo! I feel really strongly that this is exactly what's happening as part of Gendo and Seele's plan to get Shinji into Eva 13. It's also part of a very long game Gendo is playing to get rid of Seele.

When Wille gets Shinji back, they bring him to the bridge and activate the DSS Choker. This actually works in Gendo's favor by giving him the very tool he needs to kill Kaworu, so I think he was anticipating that Wille would use it on Shinji. Hell, the Mark.04 B might have been planted on the tesseract specifically to encourage Unit 01's awakening to ensure he'd get it.

I don't think Wille is intentionally trying to keep Shinji ignorant. It just happens as a combination of bad timing and pressure from Nerv/Seele forces. During the bridge scene, they're in the middle of an important operation and don't have time to spend on Shinji. I know it sounds cruel, but keep in mind that he's not part of their organization and they don't know where his sympathies might lie yet. Plus, they're immediately attacked by the Nemesis series right after the choker is activated. The timing here is so incredibly convenient that I'm willing to bet the Nemesis drones were hanging around waiting for the choker's activation signal to transmit before attacking.

Wille do try to bring Shinji up to speed later, but he stops believing them thanks to Rei. Gendo wanted Shinji to grow closer to Rei from the beginning and their relationship provides a really easy way for him to manipulate Shinji whenever he needs to. He used her to pressure Shinji into piloting Unit 01 in the first place. She's the reason Shinji awakened Unit 01. Here, she's a wedge to keep Shinji from joining Wille even though they're on the same side. Why else dress the Vessel of the Adams up as a Unit 00 knock-off when Mari implies that it hadn't looked like one before? To ensure Shinji's compliance. He's already skeptical of Misato and would never believe her when (a) Rei is right in fromt of him. Rei's invoked once more later on, but I'll come back to that.

I can't figure out how they timed Mark.09's attack on the Wunder short of Rei Q having some kind of psychic powers. Again there's very convenient timing but unlike before, there's nothing I can see that would have told Nerv "this is the time to attack."

Shinji's alienated from this new Rei and he starts growing closer to Kaworu, just as Seele has been planning since the end of 1.0. Gendo's distant and aloof, but he and Fuyutsuki are hanging back and watching which approach Seele will take to get Shinji into Eva 13 and planning their counterattack accordingly. There are little scenes that show Gendo and the Professor are keeping close tabs on Shinji.

Seele needs Shinji and Kaworu to pilot together to bring about Instrumentality, but Shinji's not going to go along with that willingly, so they take advantage of Tokyo-3's situation and have Kaworu deceive and guilt him by saying it's Shinji's fault. Kaworu then tells him Eva can fix it, so ideally he'll get into the Eva with the good intentions of restoring the Earth and it'll be too late for him to back out when the truth is revealed.

But this is where Gendo delivers his master stroke and signs their death warrants. Right before Eva 13 is completed, before Kaworu says the time is at hand and has a chance to make his move, Fuyutsuki goes to have a little chat with Shinji under the pretense of a friendly game of shogi. And he hammers the Rei Button for all that it's worth, driving Shinji to the depths of despair and convincing him that nothing good comes from Eva.

This pays off when Kaworu approaches him in his room. Shinji's so crushed and despairing that he won't even think of getting into the Eva until Kaworu does his gesture of "trust" and takes the DSS Choker. And as soon as he does, Gendo has won. Fuyutsuki's conversation was a calculated blow with this outcome in mind, as it not only ensures Kaworu puts on the DSS Choker, but it also makes Shinji so desperate for redemption that he won't heed Kaworu's warnings and won't be stopped from collecting the Spears.

Something about the two Spears of Longinus makes Kaworu register as a Pattern Blue Angel on the DSS Choker. He was the 1st Angel the whole time but he never showed as Blue until that moment, which must have been Gendo's plan with the "anomalous 13th Angel." Get the Choker on Kaworu, reveal him as an Angel, and mission accomplished.

Gendo waits until after Lilith's head explodes before he moves to kill Seele because it means the plan is a success and Kaworu will shortly be neutralized. After that, he just sweet talks Seele into the grave and clears the board for himself. He also says that Seele abandoned the "Killing of God," so I don't think Kaworu would have died if the Spear of Cassius had been there like Kaworu/Seele had planned.

Even the battle in Dogma looks like it was planned around this end goal. Look how Nerv's Evas are equipped: Mark.09 has that big scythe, but Eva 13 has no offensive weapons that we see. Apparently it doesn't even have a progressive knife, just the four RS Hoppers. But it doesn't need weapons because A) Mark.09 is there to do the heavy legwork, and B) Eva 13 has unlimited power while Wille's Evas don't, so it just needs to stall them until they run out of power instead of defeating them, which risks the Eva being incapacitated or destroyed.

People have knocked Asuka for not bothering to explain the situation to Shinji here, but I think it makes sense that it doesn't happen. Mari and Asuka's mission doesn't actually have anything to do with Shinji specifically. He's only involved because he was duped into piloting the Eva. They're there to destroy Evas 13 and 9, just like Misato said before. They don't waste time chit-chatting because they're on a mission with a limited operation window and Shinji's presence doesn't factor into that. Asuka didn't even know he was in the Eva at first.

I think they would have set Shinji straight if they had succeeded, but Mark.09 provides just enough interference to divide Wille's forces and ensure that doesn't happen.

That's just my take on events, of course, but I do think Rebuild Gendo is clever enough to pull off a gambit of that magnitude and to do it right under Seele's noses. Gendo's keikaku power is no joke!

My take on this Gendo has changed just a little. He's still a monumental asshole who is cruelly using his son for his own goals, but he did save Shinji from Seele. I don't know if he even considered his plans from that angle, but I don't think he's reached the level of sheer bastardry Manga Gendo had just yet.

Last edited by BlueBasilisk on Wed Nov 18, 2015 1:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Someday I hope that we'll be reunited if that is what's destined to be. Perhaps we'll discover that elusive bible. And then we will finally be free!

gryzzli86 wrote:Anno subverting the audience's expectations by eliding the events of the preview, imo that's a really interesting narrative device. What doesn't make sense is the popular assumption that because none of the actual shots from the trailer were replicated in the film itself, that means that the events of the trailer never happened and that the preview was BS from start to finish.

Is that really a common viewpoint? I don't think I've ever seen it expressed around here.

While given the long production periods it's only natural that some elements would have been changed by the production team, I don't picture Anno just waking up one day, manically throwing out his Q script and starting from scratch. (... and now I do picture it). My point in all this is that either the whole of Q is just this massive nightmare in Shinji's head, with Yui or whoever playing to his longstanding abandonment issues (which imho would be a pretty lazy cop-out), or several key characters are deliberately withholding key information from him in order to have him behave the way they want him to (which is a slightly terrifying prospect, but at least a fairly consistent one).

I've seen that idea floated before, but it doesn't really hold up. Wille were in the process of answering all of his questions when ReiQ attacked, so it's less a matter of people withholding information than it is events conspiring to make conveying that information impossible. The one exception is Asuka during the fight at the end, but given that she was frustrated and angry and trying very hard to save the world there I think it's explained away pretty easily.

Leading Shinji to believe that he caused the quasi-destruction of mankind, when we clearly saw Kaworu ending N3I in the Ha's "stinger", and quite a bit of human activity and EoE-esque politicking in the Q preview, has to have some deeply cynical purpose, but I can't figure out what that purpose could be given that both Wille and Nerv are doing this. Given Kaworu's deeply guilt-tripping spiel while looking at the desolation in Q, and his baffling foreknowledge of pretty much the entire events of NTE with the notable exception of the spear bait-and-switch (or whatever that was), and I have a really hard time taking anything he says at face value.

The simplest explanation is that what they're saying is 100% true and we just haven't seen the intervening events that connect the dots. For example, if the SoC was removed and 3I continued Shinji would very much be responsible for starting the initial process, and that would explain everything that's said thereafter.

Last edited by Bagheera on Thu Feb 25, 2016 3:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

For my post-3I fic, go here.The law doesn't protect people. People protect the law. -- Akane Tsunemori, Psycho-PassPeople's deaths are to be mourned. The ability to save people should be celebrated. Life itself should be exalted. -- Volken Macmani, Tatakau Shisho: The Book of BantorraI hate myself. But maybe I can learn to love myself. Maybe it's okay for me to be here! That's right! I'm me, nothing more, nothing less! I'm me. I want to be me! I want to be here! And it's okay for me to be here! -- Shinji Ikari, Neon Genesis EvangelionYes, I know. You thought it would be something about Asuka. You're such idiots.

When she double taps it in the head on the roof of the Wunder, she says "Could that really be the Vessel of Adams?" It suggests that they're familiar with the Vessel but didn't know it was Mark.09 until just that moment. It doesn't actually imply that they hadn't fought the Mark.09 previously either, but Mari blows its head off easily in this battle that it seems like they would have made the connection before.

Edit: I'm not sure why I included that little tangent now that I think about it. When the Vessel started its Unit 00 cosplay isn't really important to the point I was trying to make. The effect it has on Shinji was.

Someday I hope that we'll be reunited if that is what's destined to be. Perhaps we'll discover that elusive bible. And then we will finally be free!

Bagheera wrote: I'm also surprised you didn't seem to make the connection between Asuka as princess and Gendo as King. If Shinji is thus the prince that puts Mari's comments in a different light, and perhaps the slap as well.

Isnt this new series of movies sort of following the structure from the happy prince book no?

It suggests that they're familiar with the Vessel but didn't know it was Mark.09 until just that moment.

Been debating on whether to make another writeup on core substance stuff. The premise behind my current idea is that human instrumentality in Rebuild is the same as with the original series but instead of Lilith being used for Third Impact, Adam is instead after autonomous Unit 06 halts the process. Adams are core based, so instead of everyone's souls turning into LCL they turned into core substance. With Unit 06 disabled to stop Lilith based instrumentality, Unit 01 acts as the trigger for Adam based instrumentality making Eva the framework for evolved life. It would explain Eva arms poking out of houses, the failures, the generalized hate for the Ikari family (Gendo plans), and why the Lillin can't be exposed to Neo-Tokyo III.

So when Mari pops off Mark.09's head, she notices it doesn't do the one thing that an Eva always does when part of it is forcibly removed (bleed profusely with PSI high enough to cut diamonds). From there, she can presume it's made of core substance and knows it is receptive to the soul of an Adam (Adam's Vessel). Blessed with the Gift of Life, Mark.09 just goes on living unable to die by conventional Knowledge.